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They used CG throughout the show, but only started using it heavily for space VFX in season 6. They used plenty of stock footage in the last two seasons, so it's not like they went full CG at some point.

You telling me the huge space battles in The Way of the Warrior and in Call to Arms were done with all models instead of CGI?

I think Call to Arms may have been mostly CGI (and is after all, only one episode before season 6 so I'd say it gets covered by the original quote) but Way of the Warrior was indeed mostly model work. There's a lot of Trek Christmas tree decorations in there filling in for the background ships.

Wouldn't it be actually easier to remaster Voyager, for precisely that reason? Meaning, you wouldn't have to mess around with recompositing model shots or anything like what they're doing with TNG-R, just do all new animations.

Notice how I said easier, not cheaper.

I must say it is cheaper too. Compared to the CGI effects of the 90's the same shot would be cheaper to be made now. Let's not forget that they did redo 3 seasons of TOS with CGI recently. And there is another thing: Who knows, maybe the effects shots of the later DS9 and VOY seasons are intact, and maybe, just maybe, they could be reused with a higher quality and resolution texture. That would bring down the prices once again. Usually newer versions of a software are backward compatible, so there might be a chance that the archived effects can be redone with a newer version of the same software. But honestly, I don't know if there is a newer software to whatever CGI software they used then.

Back to being cheaper: I just marvel at some of the fan stuff out there with modern CGI techniques. YouTube has a lot of videos made by fans, and some of them are truly spectacular. (ok, some of them are terrible)

Dream wrote:

You telling me the huge space battles in The Way of the Warrior and in Call to Arms were done with all models instead of CGI?

Yeap. Just pop in your DS9 disc and pay close attention. It is clearly model based battle. As a contrast, "What you leave behind" did reuse some of the earlier effects in the episode, so you can see contrast between CGI and model elements in that episode as well, but when CGI is used I say it is pretty apparent.

Wouldn't it be actually easier to remaster Voyager, for precisely that reason? Meaning, you wouldn't have to mess around with recompositing model shots or anything like what they're doing with TNG-R, just do all new animations.

Notice how I said easier, not cheaper.

I must say it is cheaper too. Compared to the CGI effects of the 90's the same shot would be cheaper to be made now. Let's not forget that they did redo 3 seasons of TOS with CGI recently. And there is another thing: Who knows, maybe the effects shots of the later DS9 and VOY seasons are intact, and maybe, just maybe, they could be reused with a higher quality and resolution texture. That would bring down the prices once again. Usually newer versions of a software are backward compatible, so there might be a chance that the archived effects can be redone with a newer version of the same software. But honestly, I don't know if there is a newer software to whatever CGI software they used then.

Back to being cheaper: I just marvel at some of the fan stuff out there with modern CGI techniques. YouTube has a lot of videos made by fans, and some of them are truly spectacular. (ok, some of them are terrible)

IIRC, what I've heard from VFX people is that CGI hasn't made effects cheaper, but you can do a bit more than they used to be able to for the same amount of money. But the biggest problem is that according to Doug Drexler on his blog, the studios have no freaking clue what to do with the files you need for the CGI models, so at best you might have the models available, but they'd be so low rez that you'd have to make new ones from scratch anyway, but absolutely none of the animation move programming.

Well they are paid to make it happen, so if it is a little bit more complicated means that they have a stable job for a few more month . It would have been good for them if the animation programing is available, but honestly, with modern CGI I wouldn't mind some more dynamic effects anyhow. As it wast stated before, we love DS9 for the story not for the effects, so if in a release we would have some original effects up-converted (Firefly had up-converted effects and were OK) and we could get a set of new HD effects like in the TOS blu-ray discs I wouldn't mind at all, as long as this would be used correctly and not abused. There were some generic shots re-used several time and could be updated/changed through new CGI effects.

What we've seen of TNG in hi def has so far been nothing short of phenomenal, and while the later seasons tended more toward a flatter, brighter look, DS9 maintained a high contrast, very diverse and very detailed look all through its seven years.

Sign me up for DS9 in hi def. All seven seasons, full recreations of the CGI and an amazing look at the model work. I would be open to more experimentation and variety of shots for the large battle scenes as well. Never what drew me to the show in the first place, but if they're starting from scratch I have no problem with them making the CG effects as engaging as they'd like.

__________________"It’s like we’ve set up Khan as some perfect ex-girlfriend/boyfriend who dumped us a long time ago, and we compare everyone we date to Khan. We’ll never be happy if we do this!" - Ryan Britt

They used CG throughout the show, but only started using it heavily for space VFX in season 6. They used plenty of stock footage in the last two seasons, so it's not like they went full CG at some point.

You telling me the huge space battles in The Way of the Warrior and in Call to Arms were done with all models instead of CGI?

I believe they where, DS9 was on its 6th season and Voyager was on its 4th season when the decision to switch to producing practically all FX shots with CGI . There are still some practical effects in the first half of DS9 season 6 i.e. the ketracel white asteroid.

I would definitely buy the entire run of DS9 on Blu-ray. That's just a given for me. I think it's too early to get excited about it, but how awesome would it be if they did DS9 concurrent with TNG? Like we get TNG season 6, then DS9 season 1, TNG season 7, DS9 season 2. I would love that.

I think this is gonna happen, both for financial and archival purposes. TNG S1 in HD has been a whole new experience even though I've seen the episodes dozens of times. I get chills thinking about how good the station sets would look in HD!

__________________
It's not you I hate, Cardassian. I hate what I became... because of you. --Miles O'Brien in "The Wounded"

A quote from trekcore, about the remastered TNG series and future remastered projects:

If CBS are to take the plunge through the wormhole and green-light a Deep Space Nine remastering into HD, Craig Weiss urges fans to start lighting up the message boards to show our interest - that's when CBS "starts to really listen"